Chapter 13: The Hidden cabin

FAYE'S POV

The cabin revealed itself slowly over the next few days—though "days" became a loosely interpreted concept when you weren't leaving to mark time by sunrise and sunset.

Rowan kept the fire burning constantly, maintaining a temperature that bordered on excessive warmth. He explained, in his careful, clinical way, that my body was still recovering from the hypothermia. That the continued heat would help my core temperature stabilize and reduce the risk of complications.

I didn't argue. Warmth felt like a mercy after so many years of being relegated to the cold margins of the pack.

On what I thought was the second day—though it might have been the third—I woke to find fresh bandages on my ribs and a new set of clothing laid out on the chair beside the bed. The dress I'd worn into the ravine was gone, replaced by simple but clean things. Linen undergarments. A soft grey shift. Wool stockings.

"Don't ask where they came from," Rowan said when he saw me examining them. "The previous tenant of this cabin left them behind years ago. They're clean, they fit reasonably well, and they're not soaked in mountain water. That's what matters."

He helped me change with the same clinical efficiency he applied to everything else. His hands were careful around my ribs, his touch professional and impersonal in a way that should have been comforting but instead made me acutely aware of how broken I was. How dependent I'd become on someone who'd found me trying to die in a ravine.

By the fourth day—or what I'd decided to count as the fourth day—I was able to sit up without immediate agony. The pain was still present, still sharp in certain positions, but it had become manageable. Survivable.

"You're healing quickly," Rowan observed, setting a bowl of something that looked like oatmeal with berries on the small table beside me. "Werewolf metabolism working in your favor. Another week and you might actually be functional."

"I should leave," I said. The words came out before I'd consciously decided to speak them, a kind of desperate impulse that my damaged wolf recognized as necessary. "They'll keep looking. Eventually they'll find this place."

"No, they won't," Rowan said with absolute certainty. He settled onto the stool that had become his de facto seat beside my bed. "This cabin exists in neutral territory. It's not marked as belonging to any pack. The wards I have in place prevent scent from carrying beyond a certain perimeter. You're safe here."

"For how long?" I asked, and my voice sounded small. Desperate. Like someone who'd already learned that safety was a temporary illusion. "How long can you hide me?"

Rowan was quiet for a long moment, his dark eyes studying my face with an intensity that made me want to look away. "That depends on what you want to do next. You can't go back to Obsidian Peak—that much is obvious. Your alpha has decided you're a problem, and problems get eliminated."

He wasn't wrong. The rejection, the disruption of the ceremony, my desperate flight into the forest—those were crimes in the pack's eyes. I'd violated sacred space. I'd claimed a bond I had no right to claim. I'd embarrassed the alpha's legitimate heir.

By pack law, I should already be dead.

"I don't know what I want," I admitted, and it felt like the most honest thing I'd said since waking in this cabin. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do now."

"For today, you're going to eat the oatmeal," Rowan said, and there was something almost gentle in his tone. "Tomorrow, we'll worry about the future. One day at a time. That's all you need to manage right now."

I wanted to argue, but he was right. I couldn't think past the immediate present. The rejection had fractured something fundamental in me, and I was still operating in a kind of shock-induced haze where time moved strangely and emotions felt distant and muted.

My wolf was stirring more now. Not back to anything approaching normal, but present in ways she hadn't been during those first days. There was still an absence where the bond with Ethan had been, still a gaping void that didn't seem like it would ever close. But the acute agony of that void was beginning to fade into something more like chronic ache. Something I might eventually learn to live with.

I ate the oatmeal. It was good—something sweet mixed into it, maybe honey, maybe something Rowan had foraged from the forest. I ate mechanically, focusing on the physical act rather than the taste, but my body was responding to the nourishment. My hands were steadier. My vision was clearer.

"You haven't told me your name," Rowan said conversationally. "I've been calling you 'you' in my head, which feels impersonal."

"Faye," I said. "My name is Faye Hartwell."

Recognition flickered across his face—just for a moment, but it was there. His dark eyes shifted slightly, some calculation or realization moving behind them.

"Hartwell," he repeated quietly. "So Alpha Silas is your father."

"Illegitimately," I said. There was no point in hiding that. My status as a bastard child was the root of everything that had happened. Without that illegitimacy, I would have been accepted. Would have been claimed. Would have mattered.

"Does that matter?" Rowan asked. "Does blood matter more than choice? Than how people treat you?"

I didn't have an answer for that. Blood had always seemed to matter in the pack—bloodline, legitimacy, the purity of alpha descent. Those things governed status, opportunity, recognition.

But Rowan's question suggested there might be another way to think about it. Another framework entirely.

"I need to understand something," Rowan said, and his tone had shifted into something more serious. "The hunters who were pursuing you. Why were they so determined? Why not just let you run and assume you'd die in the wilderness anyway?"

"Because of Lydia," I said. "My half-sister. She wanted me dead. Wanted me to disappear so completely that no one would ever question what happened to me."

"Why?" Rowan pressed. "That's the part I need to understand. Why was your death so important to her that she'd pursue you into the ravine? What did you do?"

The rejection. The claim on Ethan that I'd been so certain about. The way my wolf had recognized him as mine before I'd fully understood what that meant.

I tried to explain it to Rowan, and he listened with the kind of focused attention that suggested he understood the significance of what I was telling him. When I finished, describing the formal rejection and the way Ethan had looked away, Rowan was quiet for a long time.

"Fated mates are rare," he said finally. "Valuable. The fact that Lydia went to such trouble to eliminate you suggests she was willing to risk significantly to keep that bond from forming."

"He rejected me," I said flatly. "The bond doesn't matter anymore. It's broken."

"Bonds can be broken," Rowan agreed. "But the question is—why did she need it broken so badly that she'd hunt you to death? If he truly rejected you, if the bond was simply one-sided hope on your part, there would be no reason to pursue."

I didn't have an answer for that either. But I could feel my wolf stirring, could sense something in Rowan's words that was touching on a truth I wasn't ready to face.

Outside, the forest was quiet. Safe. Hidden.

And somewhere in the distance, Lydia was probably still searching, still convinced that I needed to be eliminated, still hunting for the girl who'd dared to claim something she believed belonged to her.

But for tonight, in this hidden cabin, I was alive.

And that was enough.